Monday, June 29, 2015

What's Your Identity?

People talk a lot about their
identity and the identities of other people. The huge controversy
about Rachel Dolezal shows how
confusing identities are.

Begin with what everybody says
these days that "identities are socially constructed." Here
is an example: if in the late 1700s the leaders of different American
states had decided against uniting into one nation, the identity of
being a citizen of the USA would
not exist today. All of
us would be citizens of whatever state we belonged to. But notice
that this social origin of the identity of being a US citizen does
not mean that individuals can simply choose to call themselves
citizens of the USA. In order to be a citizen you need to follow
complex rules and procedures. What you want to be or identify
yourself as is of relatively little importance.

A second lesson from this
public debate is that there are different kinds of identities. Some
rest on facts. You can only claim the identity of being a centenarian
if you have actually lived 100 or more years. Some mornings I get up
with serious aches and pains and I feel as if I were 100 years old.
But that does not make me a centenarian. That identity rests in
facts.

Being male or female used to be
one of those identities depending on certain facts. The interesting
thing about Caitlyn Jenner and other transgender persons is that we
have decided that how one feels on the inside is a more significant
criterion for gender identity than one's external genitals.

Gender has now become an
identity that we can choose and it is a different
kind of
identity from one's national identity which
one's choices alone cannot determine.

But
the case of Rachel Dolezal shows that there is a third kind of
identity which the bearer of that identity has no part in
determining. These are identities imposed on us from the outside, by
other persons. The court system, for instance, identifies certain
persons as felons. In a number of cases, the court is mistaken. A
prisoner is called a felon even though justice miscarried in his case
and he is innocent. But he may spend the rest of his life
incarcerated, or unable to vote, or, if he is able to leave prison,
unable to find work.

Being
black is sometimes a matter of personal choice. Some descendants
of African slaves had so many white ancestors that they can "pass"
and enter the population as a white person. They choose to be whites
in spite of the facts about their ancestry. Other descendants
of African slaves have dark skin. Their hair is not straight by
nature. Given those external marks, white society imposes on them the
identity of a "Black." The litany of all the faults that
Blacks may be suspected of is too familiar to rehearse once more.
This identity is not supported by facts. It is certainly not chosen
by the people who get stereotyped with this identity by Whites. It is
imposed by white society.

If
descendants
of African slaves can identify as whites, why cannot a white person
identify as black? In so far as color identities are subject to
choice, no one can fault Rachel Dolezal. But she cannot claim that
she has been stereotyped in the terribly negative and undeserved way
that most African – Americans still find themselves stereotyped in
North America and elsewhere.

It is not clear to me that she
is claiming that. If she is, is she lying? Well she might just be
misinformed or confused. To accuse her of lying, one must be able to
show that she is deliberately misrepresenting her experience. Outside
of her family not many people are in a position to accuse her of
that.

Some observers have drawn the
lesson from this public debate that we should stop talking so much
about identities. The lesson I draw from it is that the concept of
personal identity is complex and subject to many confusions. One
should step very cautiously when one enters the terrain of personal
identity.